A cabbie picks up a nun.
She gets into the cab, and notices that the VERY handsome cab driver won't stop staring at her.
She asks him why he is staring.
He replies: "I have a question to ask, but I don't want to offend you".
She answers, "My son, you cannot offend me. When you're as old as I am and have been a nun as long as I have, you get a chance to see and hear just about everything. I'm sure that there's nothing you could say or ask that I would find offensive."
"Well, I've always had a fantasy to have a nun kiss me."
She responds, "Well, let's see what we can do about that:
#1, you have to be single and #2, you must be Catholic."
The cab driver is very excited and says, "Yes, I'm single and a Catholic!"
"OK" the nun says. "Pull into the next alley."
The nun fulfills his fantasy with a kiss that would make a hooker blush.
But when they get back on the road, the cab driver starts crying.
"My dear child," said the nun, "Why are you crying?"
"Forgive me but I've sinned. I lied and I must confess; I'm married and I'm Jewish."
The nun says, "That's OK. My name is Kevin and I'm going to a Halloween party."
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Oslo Great for Software Development
Today our newspapers mentioned the fact that in August 2004, the warm Gulf stream stopped completely for two weeks. The government was secretly warned that they should consider hamstering fuel and food because if it would stay that way, the average temperature in this country would drop by ten degrees Celcius - an "extinction-level event" for Norway. The reason Norwegian scientists took this event so seriously is the fact that contrary to popular belief, dramatic global climatic changes often came in a matter of decades or even years, not eons.Norwegian scientists take climatic changes very seriously - they have taken the initiative to store most of the world's seeds inside a mountain - the botanical equivalent of the "Ark" in the movie Deep Impact.
In spite of the fact that Norway is the world's third largest oil exporter, 100% of Norway's electricity production is hydro-electricity.
Norway is great for software development because summers and social life don't really exist here. Opera and Qt are made in Oslo, and one of the most promising newcomers on the comp. Go scene is the Norwegian Fredrik Dahl's WinHonte.
Update #1: A thick blanket of snow covers the garden now and I saw three deer calves pass by.
Update #2: Holy Guacamole! I discovered today that even with winter tires, it is impossible to move even one millimeter, on ice. And you can't brake or change directions either. And that people can't push you to get unstuck either, because they'll slide as well. I learned a lot today. It's possible to thoroughly de-ice a car with a plastic cutting board and six buckets of warm water. And that I need to buy spikes ASAP or starve (I live miles from the nearest shop and it's an sheet of ice out there steep down the hill). My car is far away down the hill and I had to walk in -5 ºC without a jacket back home - stupid me. In Norway they say: "Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær". Since Norwegian is so extremely similar to English, I don't have to translate this. I don't have money for those spikes. Then again, I shouldn't have moved to the middle of nowhere.
"I have no problem obeying the law, I do have a problem obeying laws that don't exist"
FIDE and ChessBase have been shamed and defeated by this article. It applies to Go as it applies to Chess. It's worth reading in its entirety. AGA and GoBase, take heed!*
Chess Games Belong To The World - Published a decade ago in "The Kibitzer".
By Tim Harding
Some chess players may think they will benefit if the recent FIDE move towards the copyrighting of chess games goes ahead, but I can assure you that 99 per cent of the chess community will suffer and that means you, dear reader. So I call on you all to put pressure on FIDE, directly or through whatever national chess organisation to which you may belong, to call a halt to this lunacy now. What should be protected is the "value added" of good notes by the players and good writers and chess teachers, not the "bare" scores (whether in print or on a web page or a computer database) that just give the moves played in a game.
Just to give the background for those who don't know the issue, FIDE announced a few weeks ago the rules for its forthcoming knockout world championship contest and these included under Paragraph 10 - Playing Conditions (10.2 c): "The players' score sheets are the property of the players and FIDE, and FIDE has exclusive rights to publication." Read those words carefully; I shall return to them later.
I am not a lawyer so will not go into many legal technicalities here, but for those who want to explore that aspect I recommend you read Mark Crowther's lengthy article on the topic in The Week In Chess, No. 146, which includes a legal opinion that sounds about right to me. You can easily find TWIC on the Net and read it for yourself.
My arguments in this column are essentially layman's views but are based on my 30+ years as an active chess player at a fairly high level, 25 years as a published chess author and journalist, and now with a publisher's hat to wear too!
Actually I doubt if FIDE have a legal leg to stand on, given there is a century of precedent of free publication of chess games worldwide while previous legal attempts to copyright games (in a few countries) have failed, so I hope that this is just a try-on and that they will back down. However, let us look at the scenario if FIDE were to win a test case in a major jurisdiction such as the USA, United Kingdom or Germany.
As a practical master-level correspondence player, I might find it beneficial to my results in the short-run if my games were harder to get hold of, so that my opponents could not so easily prepare for me, and it may be that FIDE hope the majority of master level players will back their move for that reason. Maybe by refusing permission for my losses to be published, I could even spare myself some blushes. However, those gains would be more than outweighed by my not easily being able to obtain the games of opponents and of other players who are approximately at my level, as well as by having to pay to see what the Kasparovs and Topalovs of this world are getting up to.
Certainly the top grandmasters are the only players, if any, who will make any money out of this. The games of major events will still be available, but somebody will get paid for them. We'll come to that in a minute. The games of ordinary Joe and Jill Soaps played in ordinary chess competitions could become unpublishable, except where players themselves send them in for publication.
In a worst case scenario, we could even see chess journalists and publishers sued for articles and books already published but it is more likely that FIDE would attempt to enforce their view on a "from now on" basis. If FIDE succeeded in controlling the game scores in events under its own jurisdiction, the world correspondence chess governing body ICCF might be tempted to try and follow suit, and the same could go for other bodies that organise chess events, such as national associations and even clubs and commercial tournament organisers.
Curiously with correspondence games, there is a split. Traditional postal games, unlike over-the-board games, are not played in public so usually only the players and perhaps the tournament director ever sees the moves. On the other hand, email games played under the auspices of ICCF and IECG cannot at present be hidden from future opponents, as these organisations email monthly reports (including the PGN game scores of all completed games) to all those who compete in their events. Of course they could change that policy.
Undoubtedly many chess organisers have doubts about the value of chess databases, and particularly free games postings on the Net, because it hits at a possible source of income for them and makes it harder, for example, to produce a saleable tournament book when
all games are already available freely. However, if they were to back FIDE's move, they would in my opinion undermine the popularity of the game. For example, newspaper columnists would have to tell their editors they can only publish a game by a player who is not fifty years dead if he or she has actually sent them the game; otherwise a fee will be payable, just as radio stations have to pay a fee for every record they spin. Speaking as somebody who wrote a national chess newspaper's weekly chess column for almost two decades, the editor and his accountant would say goodbye and run a column on Scrabble or knitting instead.
Now to put on my chess publisher hat, I would fear that "Chess Mail" (and many other magazines) might have to cease publication if copyright was enforceable on correspondence games. At the very least, we could only publish games sent to us by either one of the
players or the tournament director and would require a written confirmation from them that we could publish the game. We might even have to cut references to other players' games from the notes! The chess publishing world would shrink dramatically. You would
probably be left, in each main language, with only two or three giants who would swallow the cut in their profits and pay up in return for the pleasure of seeing most of their competition vanish - and maybe a few minnows whose circulation and income would be too small to be worth suing.
With my chess author hat on, I can tell you that publishers would eagerly start commissioning books on areas of the game that wouldn't easily fall under FIDE's hammer (e.g. endgame books, books on 19th century chess, chess variants and players' autobiographies) while the authors of openings manuals would be told that it is no longer OK to include modern complete games unless they are accompanied by a notarised letter of permission from one of the players. In other words, forget openings books.
I always have written my own books and articles under the (up to now) prevailing view that bare unannotated game scores are public events, like the scorecard of a cricket or baseball game which could be compiled by anyone who watched it. Quoting other people's annotations at length would normally require permission, but short excerpts would fall under the accepted principle in the academic world that free quotations for the purpose of comment and criticism are normal practice essential for free debate. When I wrote notes to one of my games for a particular magazine, as a favour to its editor, and then saw it copied (without even a "may I?" request) in "Fernschach", I moaned but I did not sue. Maybe next time!
At this point, I would just like to refer back to the FIDE rule above, which really mixes up two different copyright issues. "The players' score sheets are the property of the players " can only be taken to the individuals' handwritten record of the game as it was in progress, and as such there is not really a problem. Of course only the most famous players can expect to be able to make any money out of selling their autographs (Kamsky tried it a few years ago) but so long as the gamescores (i.e. the record of the moves) remain available, I would not have any problem with this.
The second part of the rule is where the problems arise: "and FIDE, and FIDE has exclusive rights to publication." The final clause is also clear enough, albeit objectionable: FIDE is saying that it, as organiser of the event, and NOT the players have the right of publishing the games. In other words, if Karpov plays Kramnik in the event and one, other or both of the players want to send the games for publication to, say, Informator or New In Chess they cannot do this without FIDE's permission (or perhaps without those publications buying some kind of licence from FIDE). Karpov can say but these are my notes, but FIDE can retort that the right to publish the game is its alone. If the readers can figure out from the notes alone what the moves were, they must have a very high IQ.
The middle part of the sentence is most curious also. In the FIDE rule quoted above, that first "and FIDE" means that FIDE intends to assert equal right with the players to ownership of the intellectual copyright of the game played between them. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether a chess game can be intellectual copyright, FIDE claims here that because a game is played under its auspices, it owns the game (at least in part). Effectively FIDE is stating that, in competing in one of its events,he players are working for FIDE on an indentured basis rather than as freelances. However, the contestants are playing for prize money, not fixed salaries, so I think this one is a non-starter, Mr Ilyuzhiminov.
Finally, are chess games copyrightable at all? As a chess author and publisher, I am certainly interested in defending copyright where it genuinely exists, especially as so many people on the Net are very casual about it. However, as Mark Crowther put it so well in TWIC 149: "I have no problem obeying the law, I do have a problem obeying laws that don't exist". Intellectual copyright may exist where an author, or artist, working alone produces a text or other identifiable piece of work (it could be sculpture or music but one-off "performance art" would not qualify) which is reproduceable. It does not have to be artistic work; a textbook or any other original writing also qualifies. In that case the law says that the creator, or his/her heirs, own the rights to reproducing it, normally until 50 years after their death. If there are joint authors, they choose to create the work together and share in the rights arising.
A chess game does not come about in this way, but rather by conflict between the two players, as a football game arises from the interplay of two sides. It's not possible for me to say "I have copyright in the white moves and you have copyright in Black's moves"; neither is meaningful without the other and even if we decide to share the rights to the game, it is debatable whether the record of a public event is copyrightable.
So finally we have to ask the old question, "cui bono?", who would benefit? Clearly apart from FIDE itself, one or two companies like ChessBase, who would be able to increase the prices of their databases, and just a few top grandmasters, who already cream off most of the money that's available to be made in the chess world. Do you really want to support a move that will make you, and chess literature poorer while these happy few get richer?
*AGA and GoBase appear to be the only Go-related commercial entities that are highly active in opposing the freedom of Go game records - and not shunning immoral or even illegal methods to achieve their goal. Do the sensible thing: Keep Go games free and don't renew your AGA membership!
Chess Games Belong To The World - Published a decade ago in "The Kibitzer".
By Tim Harding
Some chess players may think they will benefit if the recent FIDE move towards the copyrighting of chess games goes ahead, but I can assure you that 99 per cent of the chess community will suffer and that means you, dear reader. So I call on you all to put pressure on FIDE, directly or through whatever national chess organisation to which you may belong, to call a halt to this lunacy now. What should be protected is the "value added" of good notes by the players and good writers and chess teachers, not the "bare" scores (whether in print or on a web page or a computer database) that just give the moves played in a game.
Just to give the background for those who don't know the issue, FIDE announced a few weeks ago the rules for its forthcoming knockout world championship contest and these included under Paragraph 10 - Playing Conditions (10.2 c): "The players' score sheets are the property of the players and FIDE, and FIDE has exclusive rights to publication." Read those words carefully; I shall return to them later.
I am not a lawyer so will not go into many legal technicalities here, but for those who want to explore that aspect I recommend you read Mark Crowther's lengthy article on the topic in The Week In Chess, No. 146, which includes a legal opinion that sounds about right to me. You can easily find TWIC on the Net and read it for yourself.
My arguments in this column are essentially layman's views but are based on my 30+ years as an active chess player at a fairly high level, 25 years as a published chess author and journalist, and now with a publisher's hat to wear too!
Actually I doubt if FIDE have a legal leg to stand on, given there is a century of precedent of free publication of chess games worldwide while previous legal attempts to copyright games (in a few countries) have failed, so I hope that this is just a try-on and that they will back down. However, let us look at the scenario if FIDE were to win a test case in a major jurisdiction such as the USA, United Kingdom or Germany.
As a practical master-level correspondence player, I might find it beneficial to my results in the short-run if my games were harder to get hold of, so that my opponents could not so easily prepare for me, and it may be that FIDE hope the majority of master level players will back their move for that reason. Maybe by refusing permission for my losses to be published, I could even spare myself some blushes. However, those gains would be more than outweighed by my not easily being able to obtain the games of opponents and of other players who are approximately at my level, as well as by having to pay to see what the Kasparovs and Topalovs of this world are getting up to.
Certainly the top grandmasters are the only players, if any, who will make any money out of this. The games of major events will still be available, but somebody will get paid for them. We'll come to that in a minute. The games of ordinary Joe and Jill Soaps played in ordinary chess competitions could become unpublishable, except where players themselves send them in for publication.
In a worst case scenario, we could even see chess journalists and publishers sued for articles and books already published but it is more likely that FIDE would attempt to enforce their view on a "from now on" basis. If FIDE succeeded in controlling the game scores in events under its own jurisdiction, the world correspondence chess governing body ICCF might be tempted to try and follow suit, and the same could go for other bodies that organise chess events, such as national associations and even clubs and commercial tournament organisers.
Curiously with correspondence games, there is a split. Traditional postal games, unlike over-the-board games, are not played in public so usually only the players and perhaps the tournament director ever sees the moves. On the other hand, email games played under the auspices of ICCF and IECG cannot at present be hidden from future opponents, as these organisations email monthly reports (including the PGN game scores of all completed games) to all those who compete in their events. Of course they could change that policy.
Undoubtedly many chess organisers have doubts about the value of chess databases, and particularly free games postings on the Net, because it hits at a possible source of income for them and makes it harder, for example, to produce a saleable tournament book when
all games are already available freely. However, if they were to back FIDE's move, they would in my opinion undermine the popularity of the game. For example, newspaper columnists would have to tell their editors they can only publish a game by a player who is not fifty years dead if he or she has actually sent them the game; otherwise a fee will be payable, just as radio stations have to pay a fee for every record they spin. Speaking as somebody who wrote a national chess newspaper's weekly chess column for almost two decades, the editor and his accountant would say goodbye and run a column on Scrabble or knitting instead.
Now to put on my chess publisher hat, I would fear that "Chess Mail" (and many other magazines) might have to cease publication if copyright was enforceable on correspondence games. At the very least, we could only publish games sent to us by either one of the
players or the tournament director and would require a written confirmation from them that we could publish the game. We might even have to cut references to other players' games from the notes! The chess publishing world would shrink dramatically. You would
probably be left, in each main language, with only two or three giants who would swallow the cut in their profits and pay up in return for the pleasure of seeing most of their competition vanish - and maybe a few minnows whose circulation and income would be too small to be worth suing.
With my chess author hat on, I can tell you that publishers would eagerly start commissioning books on areas of the game that wouldn't easily fall under FIDE's hammer (e.g. endgame books, books on 19th century chess, chess variants and players' autobiographies) while the authors of openings manuals would be told that it is no longer OK to include modern complete games unless they are accompanied by a notarised letter of permission from one of the players. In other words, forget openings books.
I always have written my own books and articles under the (up to now) prevailing view that bare unannotated game scores are public events, like the scorecard of a cricket or baseball game which could be compiled by anyone who watched it. Quoting other people's annotations at length would normally require permission, but short excerpts would fall under the accepted principle in the academic world that free quotations for the purpose of comment and criticism are normal practice essential for free debate. When I wrote notes to one of my games for a particular magazine, as a favour to its editor, and then saw it copied (without even a "may I?" request) in "Fernschach", I moaned but I did not sue. Maybe next time!
At this point, I would just like to refer back to the FIDE rule above, which really mixes up two different copyright issues. "The players' score sheets are the property of the players " can only be taken to the individuals' handwritten record of the game as it was in progress, and as such there is not really a problem. Of course only the most famous players can expect to be able to make any money out of selling their autographs (Kamsky tried it a few years ago) but so long as the gamescores (i.e. the record of the moves) remain available, I would not have any problem with this.
The second part of the rule is where the problems arise: "and FIDE, and FIDE has exclusive rights to publication." The final clause is also clear enough, albeit objectionable: FIDE is saying that it, as organiser of the event, and NOT the players have the right of publishing the games. In other words, if Karpov plays Kramnik in the event and one, other or both of the players want to send the games for publication to, say, Informator or New In Chess they cannot do this without FIDE's permission (or perhaps without those publications buying some kind of licence from FIDE). Karpov can say but these are my notes, but FIDE can retort that the right to publish the game is its alone. If the readers can figure out from the notes alone what the moves were, they must have a very high IQ.
The middle part of the sentence is most curious also. In the FIDE rule quoted above, that first "and FIDE" means that FIDE intends to assert equal right with the players to ownership of the intellectual copyright of the game played between them. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether a chess game can be intellectual copyright, FIDE claims here that because a game is played under its auspices, it owns the game (at least in part). Effectively FIDE is stating that, in competing in one of its events,he players are working for FIDE on an indentured basis rather than as freelances. However, the contestants are playing for prize money, not fixed salaries, so I think this one is a non-starter, Mr Ilyuzhiminov.
Finally, are chess games copyrightable at all? As a chess author and publisher, I am certainly interested in defending copyright where it genuinely exists, especially as so many people on the Net are very casual about it. However, as Mark Crowther put it so well in TWIC 149: "I have no problem obeying the law, I do have a problem obeying laws that don't exist". Intellectual copyright may exist where an author, or artist, working alone produces a text or other identifiable piece of work (it could be sculpture or music but one-off "performance art" would not qualify) which is reproduceable. It does not have to be artistic work; a textbook or any other original writing also qualifies. In that case the law says that the creator, or his/her heirs, own the rights to reproducing it, normally until 50 years after their death. If there are joint authors, they choose to create the work together and share in the rights arising.
A chess game does not come about in this way, but rather by conflict between the two players, as a football game arises from the interplay of two sides. It's not possible for me to say "I have copyright in the white moves and you have copyright in Black's moves"; neither is meaningful without the other and even if we decide to share the rights to the game, it is debatable whether the record of a public event is copyrightable.
So finally we have to ask the old question, "cui bono?", who would benefit? Clearly apart from FIDE itself, one or two companies like ChessBase, who would be able to increase the prices of their databases, and just a few top grandmasters, who already cream off most of the money that's available to be made in the chess world. Do you really want to support a move that will make you, and chess literature poorer while these happy few get richer?
*AGA and GoBase appear to be the only Go-related commercial entities that are highly active in opposing the freedom of Go game records - and not shunning immoral or even illegal methods to achieve their goal. Do the sensible thing: Keep Go games free and don't renew your AGA membership!
Monday, October 30, 2006
AGA Corruption - Members Leaving
Remember that AGA published a buch of lies and slander about me and my software, and that I offered a free copy of Moyo Go to anyone cancelling their membership?
Well, some folks cancelled their membership. But now it turns out that some people don't renew their membership! I have just been informed by someone that they received this email from AGA:
Your American Go Association membership is critical to sustaining and growing the American Go-playing community, which has experienced record growth in the last few years, with more tournaments, clubs and activities that ever before. Your membership expires on x/xx/2006 and we're counting on your continued support to enable us to continue publishing the popular weekly E-Journal, the Yearbook, rating players, and promoting American Go across the country.
This someone hasn't forgotten about what AGA did in an attempt to harm my business!
This person's AGA membership has expired and now it's AGA, and not me, who will be left in the cold because this person is not going to renew the subscription. Chapeau. Some people do have principles.
So that's several AGA memberships down the drain for who knows - the coming decade? With 30 USD/year for say the coming ten years and three people disgusted with them, that makes 900 USD in lost income for AGA. That's perhaps comparable to the damage AGA caused to my Go software company. I can't judge it because I have more than 100 American customers, but AGA's "review" was incredibly vile so it must have had a negative effect on at least their more naive readership.
When I asked AGA to rectify their nonsense, they invited anyone to write why they did not like me, so the following AGA eJournal had gems like: "I think that Frank might even install a virus on my computer, I don't trust him".
I have a dark brown suspicion that it's going to be much more than a handful of non-renewers, if AGA does not publicly apologize and publishes an unbiased review of my software. I'm not asking for laurels, I'm asking to cut the slander and lies, that's all. People are wiser than to subsidise an organization that puts the political/commercial agenda of their officers before unbiased reporting.
Be ethical - don't renew your AGA subscription. They don't deserve it. Instead of buying a year of AGA subscription, send AGA a protest email, send it to me with full headers and receive Moyo Go Studio for the same price as a year of AGA membership. AGA might think they are "big" and I am "small", but we will see who has the last laugh. Thousands of people read this blog (more than 1500 profile views). I have more than a hundred American customers. Americans read this blog too. Please boycot AGA, until they stop boycotting me. They don't deserve your money. They are not interested in unbiased reporting, but they are interested in your money.
Well, some folks cancelled their membership. But now it turns out that some people don't renew their membership! I have just been informed by someone that they received this email from AGA:
Your American Go Association membership is critical to sustaining and growing the American Go-playing community, which has experienced record growth in the last few years, with more tournaments, clubs and activities that ever before. Your membership expires on x/xx/2006 and we're counting on your continued support to enable us to continue publishing the popular weekly E-Journal, the Yearbook, rating players, and promoting American Go across the country.
This someone hasn't forgotten about what AGA did in an attempt to harm my business!
This person's AGA membership has expired and now it's AGA, and not me, who will be left in the cold because this person is not going to renew the subscription. Chapeau. Some people do have principles.
So that's several AGA memberships down the drain for who knows - the coming decade? With 30 USD/year for say the coming ten years and three people disgusted with them, that makes 900 USD in lost income for AGA. That's perhaps comparable to the damage AGA caused to my Go software company. I can't judge it because I have more than 100 American customers, but AGA's "review" was incredibly vile so it must have had a negative effect on at least their more naive readership.
When I asked AGA to rectify their nonsense, they invited anyone to write why they did not like me, so the following AGA eJournal had gems like: "I think that Frank might even install a virus on my computer, I don't trust him".
I have a dark brown suspicion that it's going to be much more than a handful of non-renewers, if AGA does not publicly apologize and publishes an unbiased review of my software. I'm not asking for laurels, I'm asking to cut the slander and lies, that's all. People are wiser than to subsidise an organization that puts the political/commercial agenda of their officers before unbiased reporting.
Be ethical - don't renew your AGA subscription. They don't deserve it. Instead of buying a year of AGA subscription, send AGA a protest email, send it to me with full headers and receive Moyo Go Studio for the same price as a year of AGA membership. AGA might think they are "big" and I am "small", but we will see who has the last laugh. Thousands of people read this blog (more than 1500 profile views). I have more than a hundred American customers. Americans read this blog too. Please boycot AGA, until they stop boycotting me. They don't deserve your money. They are not interested in unbiased reporting, but they are interested in your money.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Publishing Progress
In a previous preview, I showed how you can, using drag & drop only, configure any kind of title, header and footer in the upcoming publishing module.You can put any SGF field(s) left and/or right aligned anywhere, as well as a few other fields (like filename, page number, current date etc.)
But that is not enough. Sometimes you want to combine fields. Instead of putting the name of a player left and her rank right, or the rank beneath the name, we want to combine fields, add perhaps even add our own text to them.
Some existing Go publishing software allows you to do that, and I want to be just as flexible, but without the need to learn any kind of cryptic "scipting language" stuff like other software has. Because the average person does not want to bother with that. Heck, I am a programmer and I don't want to bother with that.
So see here the solution: You build your own custom fields by simply typing text and combining them with available fields. Anyone intuitively understands how that works, it is impossible to make a mistake, and there is no need to learn Backus-Naur grammar or XML or whatever.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Bone For Microsoft
The boffins at Microsoft appear to be stuck with their Bayesian network after they copied it from me, and they have been trying to pick my brain using nefarious means.
Here-ya-go:
Interview with Jeff Hawkins on his book "On Intelligence".
Paper by Jeff Hawkins on Hierarchical Temporal Memory.
Powerpoint presentation for his talk at IBM's Almaden Institute.
..and the lecture itself:
Here-ya-go:
Interview with Jeff Hawkins on his book "On Intelligence".
Paper by Jeff Hawkins on Hierarchical Temporal Memory.
Powerpoint presentation for his talk at IBM's Almaden Institute.
..and the lecture itself:
Friday, October 20, 2006
Killer Moose On The Loose
I wanted to put out the trash but decided to wait until the moose finished eating the cherry tree.As you can see, those animals (craftily avoiding having to use the plural of moose) are designed to kick the crap out of bears, nerdy programmers and their landlords.
As that moose was nibbling on the apples, my landlord walked up to it and said: "Shoo!". The moose took a little step towards the landlord, and another, and appeared to prepare to start doing what moose have a talent for - breaking your bones. My landlord prevented this by running towards it, yelling intimidatingly. This resulted in the moose wreaking havoc on our neighbors' hedge by running through it. But it returned a little later and I made this picture. It was barely bothered by the flash.
That's my Saab 900 in the back, it got repaired today because it failed the EU test.
We used it in Lapland and once there was a reindeer walking in front of us. (Reindeer are cutesy fluffy animals, especially compared to the plural of moose). Now and then it would turn its head and give us some room to pass - when we wouldn't, it would take the middle of the road again. Sweet.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Japanese Birthday Presents
Look what I got for my birthday :-)A Japanese customer (his name is Wataru) sent me not one, but TWO Japanse Go software packages!
Not only that, but also the latest CD by Kitaro, "Asian Café".
And a bunch of other stylish stuff, with which I have decorated the room.
These kind of things give me renewed energy. Unbelievable. We're talking about a paying customer who gives me a birthday present costing way over 200 $!
This might have been the best birthday present I ever got.
Thank you, Wataru!
Corrupt AGA Attacks Again
This is from AGA's website. Notice the "infomercials" for MasterGo (--33,000 pro games--) and SmartGo (--38,000 pro games--).MoyoGo offers 52,000 pro games. But for some reason, AGA's webmaster does not mention that Moyo Go contains 52,000 pro games.
That's biased reporting. That's cheating your paying members out of valuable information. Let them decide what is ethical. Do not essentially lie to your members by hiding information they pay you to provide. A classic example of biased reporting. Hiding positive facts because of personal financial motives. Highlighting aspects of product X and hiding the same aspects of product Y with the intent of benefitting financially. Why is the public informed of the number of pro games in MasterGo and not in MoyoGo?
Very simple. MasterGo's author is Chuck Robbins.
And Chuck Robbins is not just AGA's webmaster, he also is an AGA Board Director!
So I guess you don't need to know. It's in the direct financial interest of AGA's webmaster and director Chuck Robbins - author of MasterGo and co-owner of Slate & Shell - to tell you how many pro games MasterGo has, rather than how many pro games Moyo Go Studio has.The proof:
Note how Bill Cobb is selling MasterGo at Slate & Shell and also working for AGA.
This is what others said about yet another AGA attack: A vile "review" of my software containing many deliberate lies and slanderous allegations, concluding that it is basically "useless crap" and might even install a virus. Philip Waldron falsely claimed the software has no Help file, and instead of focussing on the pattern expert system, he ignores it and calls the software a "game database" and says that the "analysis feature performs poorly". Note: There is no analysis feature in Moyo Go. He was confused with the auto-annotation of patterns with a high statistical move-likelihood.
If you are a customer of Moyo Go Studio, and if you are an AGA member, please tell them what you think of this. I am working hard to provide free updates of my software, but I need your help, defending myself against AGA's ongoing information warfare campaign of rigged reviews and censored listings.
Shame on AGA's leadership and shame on AGA's members who allow Slate & Shell's hijacking of AGA to continue.
AGA has been punished by the Ing Foundation for alleged financial malfeasance (starting Slate & Shell with Ing money), but there have been rumors that Ing considers sponsoring AGA again. Please inform the Ing Foundation that AGA is still as corrupt as before:
Ing Chang-ki Wei-ch'i Education Foundation
4th floor, Kuang-Fu Bldg
35 Kuang Fu S. Rd.
Taipei, Taiwan
Monday, October 16, 2006
Competition Is Good
The StoneBase ripoff debâcle made me realize that although I am a "leader" in the Go software world (there are more Go software "leaders", but none of them produces commercial software) , I have to constantly be aware of what the competition is doing. Go software is so complex that implementing the "major" things takes years, but "small" things can be done when the inspiration is there.A while ago, SmartGo went out on a limb and purchased a lot of professional, custom-made glyphs. (SmartGo buys them, StoneBase steals them and I draw them by hand). It looks really expensive and professional (although a bit ugly and not so intuitive, in my opinion, but others complimented Anders on his new GUI so it might just be a matter of taste - it sure looks better than the previous one ;-).
I wondered why my own glyphs looked a bit less fancy. I figured it had something to do with the background color. SmartGo's is light blue. When I got up today, I implemented a new way of handling themes. Instead of choosing theme names, you choose theme colors now, and much more of the user interface becomes "themed". See here the light blue theme. Looks great!
I always strive to reduce clutter, so I eliminated toolbar borders and -gradients.
The StoneBase guy drew my negative attention last week, so I decided to evaluate his software. It is clear that Moyo Go served as an example, and he actually said so. No harm in that, but I went looking for some improvement ideas. I found one: Moyo Go's old triangle annotation obscured the stone numbers. I liked the solution of using a small triangle in the lower right corner. Done.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Quest for Unicode
This was lacking. CJK language support in Hints (the Korean text example displayed here is nonsense).Every time I go back to the publishing module, a "showstopper" event occurs that pulls me off it again. A few days ago I implemented Unicode support for the board hint.
But because the component I used for that is buggy, the program crashed at exit. It took me about 5 hours to find that out (I can't concentrate very well). Some weird stack overwrite due to a rogue pointer.
I then tried to do it another way, but due to yet another bug in that 3rd party code, that didn't work either.
So in good "not invented here" tradition, I decided to roll my own! See here the result.
Friday, October 13, 2006
That What Not Kills You, Makes You Stronger
At least when we're talking about the various ways my evil enemies try to make my life miserable.
I just suffered a DDOS attack, my webhost called it a "synflood" attack due to the open DNS servers. They were open because they updated their servers and forgot to close them. The attack came mainly from China (from "zombies", hijacked computers). For 24 hours, I could not receive email either.
Now who would be behind this..
Anyway, I have just now denied the entire People's Republic of China access to my website, including this blog. No idea how it works through a proxy server, but if everything went according to how it is intended to work (.htaccess file), China can't see me any more.
If you are in China, and you can read this, drop me a line at frank@moyogo.com, give me your IP range and I'll fix it ;-)
I just have limited the bandwidth of my website to 1 GB/hour, so I won't get any nasty surprises later on.
I just suffered a DDOS attack, my webhost called it a "synflood" attack due to the open DNS servers. They were open because they updated their servers and forgot to close them. The attack came mainly from China (from "zombies", hijacked computers). For 24 hours, I could not receive email either.
Now who would be behind this..
Anyway, I have just now denied the entire People's Republic of China access to my website, including this blog. No idea how it works through a proxy server, but if everything went according to how it is intended to work (.htaccess file), China can't see me any more.
If you are in China, and you can read this, drop me a line at frank@moyogo.com, give me your IP range and I'll fix it ;-)
I just have limited the bandwidth of my website to 1 GB/hour, so I won't get any nasty surprises later on.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Web Closing Around Mr. Shui
The web is closing around the StoneBase pirate.
Stonebase's author is a Mr. A Shui from Beijing:
其作者是北京的阿水（Awater）先生
I wonder what else he stole from other colleagues. Some of my stuff is encrypted (like the giant human hand cursor), but anything he could extract out of the (pirated..) executable, he did.
Anyway, with this I can continue the hunt, there must be a lot of Shui's in Beijing but at least this narrows it down. I just need his address in order to serve him with a supoena by a Chinese lawyer. The good thing is that it probably is not going to cost me too much to hire one of Beijings most vociferous and successful lawyers who have experience with this kind of thing.
People seem to think that getting pirated in China is somehow "unavoidable", but that's nonsense. The Chinese government is eager to show the West that they take such crime seriously, and consequently the Chinese Police come down hard on perpotrators.
This is what happened with another Go software thief: ("Fair Use": I purchased this article for 8$ but since Google started scanning and making freely available all major US newspaper articles of the past decades, this article has entered the public domain)
SONNI EFRON. The Los Angeles Times. (Record edition). Los Angeles, Calif.: Aug 19, 1999. pg. 1
"They burst onto the international go scene about 2 1/2 years ago with a program called "Silver Igo" developed by a North Korean state-run trading enterprise called Silver Star. Competitors were amazed that North Korea could afford to channel top computer experts into game programming at a time when the cash-strapped Stalinist state was begging for food aid.
"They are probably thinking about other businesses," explained Naritatsu Yamamoto of Silver Star Japan, which represents the North Korean go and shogi programs. "They want to demonstrate their technical skills in order to get other work."
Silver Igo beat 40 other programs from around the world to win the FOST cup, run by an artificial-intelligence group, in Tokyo in August 1998.
But soon after, the Chinese author of one of the most successful go programs, Chen Zhixing, accused the Silver Igo program of having plagiarized his "Handtalk." Chen, 69, a retired chemistry professor from Guangzhou, China, has posted the accusations, along with details of the allegedly cribbed computer code, on his Web page at http://www.wulu.com/ and demanded the return of the FOST cup title.
Masahiro Okasaki, who was the chief judge for the tournament, said Silver Igo was not a direct copy of Handtalk, although like many programs, it imitated the ideas of the powerful Chinese program.
The legalities of software plagiarism remain vague in Japan, and the North Koreans were allowed to keep their title. But in a bit of intrigue around the same time, the Silver Star head was executed in North Korea, reportedly for political reasons having nothing to do with the go program, according to Okasaki.
The go world remains abuzz with rumors about the incident and questions about whether the Silver Star executive might have been executed because the plagiarism charges had embarrassed the North Korean leadership. Okasaki emphatically denies that version of events.
Japanese media did report the execution of a trading company executive in September 1998 but did not name the official or even the date when he was reportedly shot. Chen, in a telephone interview, said he has had no response to his allegations. And hermitic North Korea's "bamboo curtain" has made the rumors virtually impossible to confirm or deny.
Meanwhile, Silver Star has been shut down, and the 22 or 23 people working in the games section have been moved to North Korea's largest computer enterprise, called KCC, according to Silver Star Japan's Yamamoto."
Stonebase's author is a Mr. A Shui from Beijing:
其作者是北京的阿水（Awater）先生
I wonder what else he stole from other colleagues. Some of my stuff is encrypted (like the giant human hand cursor), but anything he could extract out of the (pirated..) executable, he did.
Anyway, with this I can continue the hunt, there must be a lot of Shui's in Beijing but at least this narrows it down. I just need his address in order to serve him with a supoena by a Chinese lawyer. The good thing is that it probably is not going to cost me too much to hire one of Beijings most vociferous and successful lawyers who have experience with this kind of thing.
People seem to think that getting pirated in China is somehow "unavoidable", but that's nonsense. The Chinese government is eager to show the West that they take such crime seriously, and consequently the Chinese Police come down hard on perpotrators.
This is what happened with another Go software thief: ("Fair Use": I purchased this article for 8$ but since Google started scanning and making freely available all major US newspaper articles of the past decades, this article has entered the public domain)
SONNI EFRON. The Los Angeles Times. (Record edition). Los Angeles, Calif.: Aug 19, 1999. pg. 1
"They burst onto the international go scene about 2 1/2 years ago with a program called "Silver Igo" developed by a North Korean state-run trading enterprise called Silver Star. Competitors were amazed that North Korea could afford to channel top computer experts into game programming at a time when the cash-strapped Stalinist state was begging for food aid.
"They are probably thinking about other businesses," explained Naritatsu Yamamoto of Silver Star Japan, which represents the North Korean go and shogi programs. "They want to demonstrate their technical skills in order to get other work."
Silver Igo beat 40 other programs from around the world to win the FOST cup, run by an artificial-intelligence group, in Tokyo in August 1998.
But soon after, the Chinese author of one of the most successful go programs, Chen Zhixing, accused the Silver Igo program of having plagiarized his "Handtalk." Chen, 69, a retired chemistry professor from Guangzhou, China, has posted the accusations, along with details of the allegedly cribbed computer code, on his Web page at http://www.wulu.com/ and demanded the return of the FOST cup title.
Masahiro Okasaki, who was the chief judge for the tournament, said Silver Igo was not a direct copy of Handtalk, although like many programs, it imitated the ideas of the powerful Chinese program.
The legalities of software plagiarism remain vague in Japan, and the North Koreans were allowed to keep their title. But in a bit of intrigue around the same time, the Silver Star head was executed in North Korea, reportedly for political reasons having nothing to do with the go program, according to Okasaki.
The go world remains abuzz with rumors about the incident and questions about whether the Silver Star executive might have been executed because the plagiarism charges had embarrassed the North Korean leadership. Okasaki emphatically denies that version of events.
Japanese media did report the execution of a trading company executive in September 1998 but did not name the official or even the date when he was reportedly shot. Chen, in a telephone interview, said he has had no response to his allegations. And hermitic North Korea's "bamboo curtain" has made the rumors virtually impossible to confirm or deny.
Meanwhile, Silver Star has been shut down, and the 22 or 23 people working in the games section have been moved to North Korea's largest computer enterprise, called KCC, according to Silver Star Japan's Yamamoto."
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
StoneBase: Theft to Slander
"AWater", the author of StoneBase (the guy that admitted to plagiarizing my stones, stone sounds and board texture - not to mention the fact that he's running a pirated copy of the program itself ), thought that the best defence is the offence, so he posted this today:
From: "Melon Ware"
Newsgroups: rec.games.go
Subject: ABOUT FRANK DE GROOT
Date: 10 Oct 2006 05:34:13 -0700
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Lines: 8
Message-ID: <1160483653.824094.139940@c28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 219.141.232.178
User-Agent: G2/1.0
X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe)
IT IS ABOUT FRANK DE GROOT ATTEMPTS MASSIVE PIRACY OF SMARTGO AND OTHER COMPETING GO SOFTWARE. THE PLAN WAS CONCEIVED BY HIM LATE LAST YEAR AND I WAS APPROACHED BY MY SOURCE AS FINANCIAL AID FOR HIS DISTRIBUTION CHAIN.
I DECIDED TO SPEAK OUT NOW BECAUSE WE LOST OUR "GUARANTEE OF VOLUME" AS PROMISED BY HIM.
The NNTP Posting-host of 219.141.232.178 (see header) resolves to beijing.asianamericancoal.com in China.
I am now in the process of finding out his real name and address, and then I will hire a lawyer in China to submit this case to the police in his city of residence. So far it's plagiarism and aggravated slander (slander with intent to cause financial damage to a competitor).
This is the WHOIS record for his website, www.stonebase.cn:
From: "Melon Ware"
Newsgroups: rec.games.go
Subject: ABOUT FRANK DE GROOT
Date: 10 Oct 2006 05:34:13 -0700
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Lines: 8
Message-ID: <1160483653.824094.139940@c28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 219.141.232.178
User-Agent: G2/1.0
X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe)
IT IS ABOUT FRANK DE GROOT ATTEMPTS MASSIVE PIRACY OF SMARTGO AND OTHER COMPETING GO SOFTWARE. THE PLAN WAS CONCEIVED BY HIM LATE LAST YEAR AND I WAS APPROACHED BY MY SOURCE AS FINANCIAL AID FOR HIS DISTRIBUTION CHAIN.
I DECIDED TO SPEAK OUT NOW BECAUSE WE LOST OUR "GUARANTEE OF VOLUME" AS PROMISED BY HIM.
The NNTP Posting-host of 219.141.232.178 (see header) resolves to beijing.asianamericancoal.com in China.
I am now in the process of finding out his real name and address, and then I will hire a lawyer in China to submit this case to the police in his city of residence. So far it's plagiarism and aggravated slander (slander with intent to cause financial damage to a competitor).
This is the WHOIS record for his website, www.stonebase.cn:
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Involuntary Organ Donation Coming Up?
The StoneBase guy ("AWater") emailed me:
"I'm so sorry. Moyogo is great software, i'm very like it. I use for
reference Moyogo to develop my software(StoneBase).
as you know, i'm ripped Moyogo's sounds and stones. but board image isn't ripped. It's downloaded from your web page background picture."
When it's copied from my website, it isn't ripped?? I have news for you - It's highly illegal and highly unethical, buddy. Not to mention the ripping of the sounds and stones from my (pirated!) software.
"I'm so sorry. Moyogo is great software, i'm very like it. I use for
reference Moyogo to develop my software(StoneBase).
as you know, i'm ripped Moyogo's sounds and stones. but board image isn't ripped. It's downloaded from your web page background picture."
When it's copied from my website, it isn't ripped?? I have news for you - It's highly illegal and highly unethical, buddy. Not to mention the ripping of the sounds and stones from my (pirated!) software.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Moyo Go at the 4th International Conference on Baduk
Łukasz Lew (computer scientist and Go player) will speak on the 4th International Conference on Baduk, the world's largest and most important Go conference. It is officially opened by Korea's Prime Minister, each year.
Part of his presentation will be about Moyo Go Studio's much acclaimed pattern system.
I can already disclose that he will not say that it sucks :-))
Part of his presentation will be about Moyo Go Studio's much acclaimed pattern system.
I can already disclose that he will not say that it sucks :-))
Sunday, October 01, 2006
The Breakfast Quiz
Alexandre Dinerchtein's Go newsletter "GoAma" rewards a copy of Moyo Go Studio to the winner of their quiz.
AGA's boring, biased rag is getting marginalized by "breakfast's" fresh initiative. GoAma already has about half the readership of AGA's propaganda tool, and GoAma is poised to become the newletter to read if you want to be up-to-date with what happens in the realm of tournaments, remarkable games and who's who in the world of Go. Of course, this is just the start - I'm sure Sasha will have no problems turning this service into the must-read Go magazine covering everything under the sun (as long as it's about Go). I recognize a winner when I see one.
AGA's boring, biased rag is getting marginalized by "breakfast's" fresh initiative. GoAma already has about half the readership of AGA's propaganda tool, and GoAma is poised to become the newletter to read if you want to be up-to-date with what happens in the realm of tournaments, remarkable games and who's who in the world of Go. Of course, this is just the start - I'm sure Sasha will have no problems turning this service into the must-read Go magazine covering everything under the sun (as long as it's about Go). I recognize a winner when I see one.